Two more great acts from the Bureau B label at Arkaoda this month with Jimi Tenor and God is God presenting live performances.
Musician and composer Jimi Tenor has never settled for the traditional role of a pop artist. He is known as a productive musician whose work lies beyond current trends, and also as a performer who combines the finest elements of afro-american music, spontaneous silliness and shameless glamour in an original way.
Jimi Tenor has always been something of a Renaissance man. On leaving his Finnish homeland for New York in the early 1990s, and later as he travelled through Europe, he quickly discovered what he calls his ikigai, his great joy in life: to record and produce music in DIY mode at home with the most rudimentary of means, spontaneously and intuitively. In more than 30 years of making music, Tenor has remained true to his ideal, whether as a solo artist on his early electronic albums or in the widely diverse collaborations and constellations which followed (with the likes of Tony Allen, Kabu Kabu, Abdissa Assefa).
Tenor’s music, along with his design and technical innovations, springs from experimental rock. His first recording band Jimi Tenor & His Shamans (1986-1992) was influenced by the early 80s industrial rock, where instruments were made out of scrap metal and plastic. Later during the 90s Tenor moved first towards electronic music, but soon got closer to his roots: 60s and 70s jazz, psychedelic soul and African funk. Whilst Tenor has predominantly released jazz and Afrobeat records over the past two decades, his live performances have often seen him return to his minimalist roots. Enthralled by how Jimi Tenor the solo artist conjured up his space music with just a synthesizer, flute and saxophone.
The duo God is God consists of Turkish musician, producer and Kinship label founder Etkin Çekin and Belarussian multi-instrumentalist, composer singer and Not Not Fun alumni Galina Ozeran who started making music after a chance meeting in Berlin in 2015. Their record Metamorphoses is the product of their second ever improvisational encounter: an undulating, avant-pop journey of low-BPM twists and turns guided by Ozeran’s synthesizers, Russian and English vocals and Çekin’s ethereal production and guitar sensibility. Central to the album’s musical narrative are both contemporary dancefloor-adjacent electronics and Eastern European and Turkish psychedelic electronic traditions – all filtered through the prism of Çekin and Ozeran’s respective musical histories.
Ozeran grew up in Vitebsk, Belarus playing classical piano before making her way to St. Petersburg to study curation and become a musician. There she formed various bands and began the lo-fi improvisational dream-pop solo project Chikiss, influenced by Soviet synth pioneers Eduard Artemiev and Alexander Zatcepin as well as American film composer Angelo Badelamenti, Laurie Anderson, and early Warp records. On Metamorphoses, this is reflected in her narcotic melody lines and sung “liquid language” – a kind of improvisational, non-semantic vocalization, which combines fluidly with Çekin’s sonic vision. The latter was honed in both Istanbul and Germany and draws equally on the sounds of Bülent Arel, Erkan Oğur and Turkish 90s indie-experimental band ZEN as well as Roedelius, La Düsseldorf and Suicide.
Jimi Tenor and God is God
15th December 2022 | Doors 19:00 | Starts 20:00 CET
arkaoda | Karl-Marx Platz 16 | 12043 Berlin
berlin.arkaoda.com | Event @ Facebook
